Fifty years ago Louis Hartz set out to tell the “storybook truth” about America. Despite being almost risibly dense, The Liberal Tradition in America neatly captures the popular folklore – this is what you might hear at the Chamber of Commerce. Meanwhile, academics are often flatly contemptuous: Hartz mangled history, muffed quotations, and did not bother with rules of evidence. Even so, for better and for worse, his version of an all-American fable lives on as an enigmatic, controversial, and enduring political science classic.